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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • I prefer to read by reflected light, not emitted light. I used to prefer real books (and I do still throughly enjoy them), but I’ve grown used to the creature comforts like waterproofness, annotations, highlighting, searching, and sheer data density of an ebook reader packed with more books than I could read in a few years. Granted I also highlighted and annotated any books I owned with reckless abandon, but the data hoarder in me loves the other aspects even more. Regarding data density, there is nothing worse than carting along a massive book while traveling only to finish it before you even arrive. If it was a book I didn’t mind leaving behind that might be okay, but now I’ve got to find a new book for the trip home too. I’ve tried to use my phone to read, but it’s uncomfortable given the small size and intense light. Also, reading in full sun on your phone will absolutely cook the internals and drain you battery, not great for something I might rely on for emergencies. So for me I read: new (usually physical) books from Indy authors or graphic heavy books (like baudy poetry from the renn-fest, comic books/graphic novels), previously loved books from thrift stores and used book shops (I absolutely love finding books in which people have left notes in the cover and margins), ebooks read on a cheap e-reader of popular stuff from disreputable sources, and listening to audiobooks from downright shady sources or podcasts on my phone.




  • I like that one of the meanings is also to pick up ideas like a bee picks up pollen. We have the power to make this an English word too. We can just start using it. I’m not doomscrolling anymore, I’m butining memes and trivia.

    Also, has anyone ever been in a friendly feeding (far from a hive) swarm of bees constantly and curiosly head butting you without getting stung? Just got to be careful they don’t get caught in your hair and panic. Just saying that getting a bunch of little bee high fives as you meander through a field is special kind of feeling.


  • By spending more on the military and the police than we do on education, science, and journalism.

    Wikipedia still isn’t a reliable source. It is a compendium of reliable sources that one can use to get an overview of a subject. This is also what these chatbots should be, but they rarely cite their sources and most people don’t bother to verify anyway.


  • I used to think coconut water tasted a little funny (odd mix of sweet, earthy, and umami, not like the coconut flesh at all). Then one day after a particularly long hot hike, I tried it again. I’d been hiking through a natural area that had lots of coconut palms. Crews had been clearing out some invasive species. This is relevant because they’d been using the same trails and had cut open and presumably drunk the water from dozens of coconuts along the way as they worked. These guys must know something I didn’t, so I looked into coconut water as a drink because I’d never heard of such a thing at the time.

    Anyway, this is all to say that I gave coconut water a second chance when my body really needed it and although it tasted exactly as I remembered it I suddenly found that it tasted fucking amazing. I’ve been a convert since then. I used to drink Gatorade, but now Gatorade just tastes salty, like Kool-aid made with ball sweat by comparison.


  • Yes, I read your comment. It’s okay if you didn’t understand my comment. Clearly you don’t understand how filesystems and drive mounting works under Linux or the role of desktop environments in managing filesystems, mounting, and permissions. I don’t doubt that you’re genuinely struggling here, but there is no call for that kind of hostility. You might have some hope for figuring it out if you open your mind to the fact that you don’t fully understand what your problem is.

    Steam expects the games to be in a particular place with a particular set of permissions and ownership relative to the user(s) and/or group(s) expected to use those game files. I’m telling that Linux doesn’t care where those files physically reside. You can tell Steam that those files are exactly where Steam expects them to be at the filesystem level, without messing with Steam configs, nautilus, gnome, or KDE. There are several ways to do this, but without understanding the requirements of your machine no one here will be able to give you effective advice.

    I’ve seen some other comments from you about running something or other as root or just blanket chmods to 777 and I can tell you from experience that those are rarely effective solutions and can sometimes make things worse (just try something like that when configuring ssh configs, keys, and permissions).



  • What does any of this have to do with KDE, Gnome, or nautilus? If symlinks aren’t working, I’d dedicate an entire drive to Steam by mounting that drive (with matching permissions) right where Steam expects to find them. You can mount a filesystem/disc/ISO/drive/network share practically anywhere you want. If your network is fast enough, I bet you could even access your games over NFS, though I wouldn’t recommend it.



  • Even Starbucks doesn’t really call that just a macchiato. It’s a latte macchiato. If it had Carmel on top and vanilla in the milk it would be a caramel macchiato. It both cases, to any fool that cared to pay attention, macchiato simply means marked. If you point that out to someone and you that rather than being right about what it’s called, it quickly becomes clear if they are just rightly confused and ignorant or looking to start some drama. Some people get VERY aggressive when they sense any slight on their pride. Some people have some very outsized feelings about how Starbucks makes and names their products.

    Same deal with the short, tall, grande, venti, trente vs. small, medium, large, 20oz, 30oz. confusion. That one was tricky because Karen’s would misinterpret the calling of the drinks to the bar as a correction. Those people were generally miserable and hopeless.

    Diplomatically negotiating these kinds of conversations is a special kind of hell, but the lessons can be valuable. Unfortunately, it’s a skill that most people don’t get paid enough for.


  • They remember at time when we weren’t all within reach of our own personal phone line 24/7. During that forgotten time, they were mostly children and expected to answer the landline and play the respectful secretary for the family. Sure, you MIGHT call someone’s house if you cared or dared to run the gauntlet of dealing with whomever answered the home phone and it wasn’t so private that you’d risk someone listening in from another room of your house or theirs. Party lines were even still a thing in some places. You could listen in to wireless handset phone with a baby monitor. Phone conversations carried a lot of emotion baggage.

    The dotcom bubble burst just after we all got cell phones. As a result of this quirk of timing, most millennials grew up socializing a lot with people remotely via text based conversations over the Internet using things like Bulletin Board Services/Forums, IRC, ICQ, newsgroups, etc. These were free and far from the prying eyes of parents or easily hidden. But, that would have all been done at the home or school computer just like the landline (usually sharing the same literal line), not a thing you carried with you.

    Millennials spent vast oceans of time being completely and utterly unreachable unless physically present and together, learning to converse face to face or in paragraphs of text from a box at home. Even emojis were text. Images were slow, small, and low quality, so the memes were rare and crafted with care.

    When millennials got their first phone, it would have been likely for most that they’d most often be used by parents checking in. Cell phones were still mostly an in case of emergency type communication device, not your daily driver. That battery was limited and charging was slow. Even though text messages of the time carried a stiff financial cost, millennials stuck in class could converse by tapping out messages on the phones physical number pad buttons while pretending to pay attention.

    TLDR: Millennials grew up during a communication technology revolution and as a result they’ve got some hang ups about always with you communication devices. Voice and video calls are an intrusion. For many, a ringing phone signals only parents, authority, or debt collectors.








  • This should be always. We could easily have 13 months with an even 28 days, or four weeks, every year. But, you’re going to say, “What about that last day?” That’s new year’s day, it’s once a year, not ever a regular day of the week, and every leap year we get 2 of them and make a weekend of it. Those remainder calendar days don’t need to be a particular day of the week, we can just make them holidays and stop worrying about it. Or we do keep them as regular days of the week and the calendar shifts by a day or two every year. I don’t really care. I just want the months and weeks to be at least a little less chaotic. And if there is going to be a chaotic little remainder weekend every year, it might as well be a party.